Wisps
by Hawki
Summary: Segaverse Oneshot: There were many things Tails didn't understand about the wisps and given their departure from Earth, never would. Still, he could at least understand the reason for their namesake.


**Wisps**

It was said that curiosity killed the cat.

Miles "Tails" Prower didn't know where such a saying came from, or how it came to be. He knew a few cats, but none of them seemed overly curious and if he factored the likes of Big or Blaze, neither of them seemed likely to perish anytime soon. But if there was any truth in the saying, if curiosity really _could _kill cats...well, he was a fox. So it wasn't an issue.

Sighing, Tails rubbed his eyes, wondering whether he turn in or follow Sonic's example and play on the Wii. Usually working during the night left him invigorated, the Tornado 2 being a historical case in point. But tonight, it just wasn't working.

_Maybe it's because I have so little to work _on...

"Touchdown! Woo!"

_...yeah, let's postpone multiplayer a little longer._

It seemed so...unfair, somehow. Saving the planet, meeting an alien race that was actually _friendly_...and then watching their effective emissary vanish into the void of space, likely never to be seen again. All Tails had been left with was the translator, clocked full with everything from Baldy McNosehair to stuff about far off sodas and aquatic mammals. It was such a translator that he'd been working on the past twelve hours, going over Yacker's phrases, creating corrected translations, but leaving the old ones for posterity. Heck, he'd even run a new algorithm to allow him to read it in English along with binary. Why? Because right now, those phrases were about the only thing he had left to study.

Simply put, he wanted to know more about the wisps.

Taking a sip of Hill Top Dew, Tails wondered if Eggman had any notes lying around on the aliens, whether he could talk Sonic into retrieving them. The latter was quite likely, the former slightly less, but in the actual science...Tails knew he could count on the supersonic hedgehog for just about anything, but delving into science wasn't really one of them. Heck, come to think of it, the kitsune was no better. He was practically delving into pseudo-science now, wondering if these phrases might have some 'ghost in the machine' forming. There was a bit of history for that, Metal Sonic being an example, but still, that had been a case of sophisticated AI coming from slightly less sophisticated AI. Here, if a ghost did form, it would be something from nothing. And the likes of the Chaos Emeralds aside, that violated all the laws of science.

"Damnit! Well, good thing I've got an extra life."

...and videogames apparently. 1-ups had a lot to answer for.

_Come to think of it, maybe the wisps do that as well..._

Yawning, Tails consulted the single page of notes he'd made in the last half-day, pertaining to everything he knew about the wisps. Most notable was their "hyper-go-on" energy, the force that Sonic had utilized in the amusement park to do everything from turning into lasers to living fireballs. Not that surprising, given his friend's ability to use power rings and Chaos Emeralds, but still, he wondered...were the wisps effectively generating something from nothing? Or was this energy effectively chemical, like the pizza he'd digested a few hours ago? That might make sense in conventional scientific circles, but how could creatures so small contain such a large amount of energy?

_Maybe that's like asking Sonic how he turns super..._

Well, Tails wasn't complaining about that ability. Yet it didn't make him any less curious. He'd be more than willing to use himself as a guinea pig, but...well, it was hard enough for him to turn into Super Tails, but the fox suspected that those golden flicky birds wouldn't make the scientific method easy for him. Blooming avians. Almost as bad as the Babylon Rogues...

Tails yawned...again. He was drifting. Out of mind, and as he considered leaving his workshop's lab, maybe out of sight as well. Just like the wisps...

_Maybe that's why they're called wisps. You see them...then they fade. Gone. Left only to memory. Or maybe it's because they're just as insubstantial. Because they can't be explained..._

Eggman might know. But the mad scientist considered knowledge a means to an end. Not that that was inherently wrong, theme parks and mind control aside, but surely a good scientist was behoved to seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge? That was the entire basis of science wasn't it? And who was to say that raw knowledge wouldn't prove useful in the future?

Well, if the wisps would, Tails realized he'd never know.


End file.
